How ‘you hate to see it’ became a meme to express disappointment

The power of the internet allows us to express our feelings and reactions in a creative and rapidly-evolving myriad of ways. Want to thirst on a celebrity? Tweet them to top you. Unsure how to express excitement? Yeet it up. Want to offer some unsolicited advice? You don’t know who needs to hear this. (But someone probably does!) Hate to see something unfortunate or regrettable unfold? Well, you hate to see it.

“You hate to see it” is one of those rare memes that, at face value, may sound more complicated than it is. The origin is unclearother than it likely surfaced on Black Twitter, where all the good memes originatebut the earliest known record comes from a February 11, 2018 Urban Dictionary entry.

It’s defined as an “all-encompassing phrase consisting of anything you dislike to observe,” with the following example:

“Hey Nikita, did you clean the bathroom?”

“Nah B”

“Damn, you hate to see it”

Likewise, another entry from just a few weeks ago, on May 16, 2019, describes it simply as: “When an unfortunate event occurs.”

A perfect example of the meme surfaced earlier this week when Complex tweeted out a story about Ciara dishing on her decision to split with Future, who, she was previously engaged to until the couple ended their relationship in August of 2014. (She has since married Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.)

After five years, however, some people pointed out that Ciara should have moved on by now, and a few of the tweets went viral:

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